Project Summary

Find a single study from the WAI database where subjects of different sex, race, ethnicity, or age groups were enrolled.

Research Interest

I was particularly interested about differences in mean absorbance between race. However, exploring the Subjects dataframe taught me that very few studies were examining racial demographics.

Findings

Rosowski et al. (2012) is a study that took a unique approach to race.

SELECT Frequency, Race,
    AVG(Absorbance) AS ave_absorbance
FROM Subjects AS s
RIGHT JOIN Measurements AS m ON m.Identifier = s.Identifier 
WHERE m.Identifier = "Rosowski_2012" AND Frequency > 200 AND Frequency < 8000
GROUP BY Race, Frequency

  Frequency      Race ave_absorbance
1  210.9375 Caucasian     0.07766760
2  210.9375 Black         0.07766760
3  210.9375 Chinese       0.07766760
4  210.9375 Asian         0.07766760
5  234.3750 Caucasian     0.09241395
6  234.3750 Black         0.09241395

Implications

Rosowski et al.’s findings suggest that there was absolutely no difference in average absorbance across “races”. In fact, there was little variation between any of the participants.

However, the data to support these claims is insufficient. Are black individuals truly less likely to experience hearing loss, or it just underreported?